Wk 2 — Activity — Virtual: Worlds
2. PLACE: Going to Long Beach State in person was a great experience especially during my first year of college. While I did not dorm, I feel as if I were truly a college student with newfound responsibilities. While my first school year was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I believe I had enough of an experience to say that my first year was pretty solid. When transferring to “Zoom University”, I believe that the first major difference was the mere fact that you did not interact with people physically in front of you. This really hit me because while it is not impossible to meet new people in the Zoom interface, its almost impossible to talk to someone privately, or just have a one on one conversation during class which was prevalent in most of my classes.
3. PLACE: The places that I visited were very different in structure, where one is a sandbox type game, and the other a MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena). So one was bigger in scale than the other but they both have the same function in allowing me and other to escape real life, and have an experience in a virtual world. These games are very different to the format of social media, in that you are relatively having real-time interaction with each other. In these worlds, we don’t care much about certain things that people do or analyze their every movements, unlike the very nature of social media such as Instagram, where each picture is almost picked apart unconsciously by the viewer, and the realities of such picture are very skewed.
4. PLACE: The places that I visited are very different from anything that you can find in real life. I believe that essentially, this is the exact purpose of these games. The idea that you can step into a completely different world and have a completely different experience unlike any other on Earth can be a very valuable thing.
5. CONCLUSIONS: From this week, I have come to realize how valuable gaming can be to a person’s daily life. Although I would not want to constantly game all day, I can say that being able to take a step back from real life, and all of the responsibilities that come with it and enjoy your time with friends or even by yourself is very valuable and can even be important to a person. As for the pandemic, I believe that gaming may have allowed people to not dread every day, and to give everyone a new enjoyable experience without being at risk of catching the virus. It is certainly possible to gain a place experience due to the wide variety of games out there, and it really is a couple of clicks away.
6. IDENTITY: I think that social media platforms can be similar to MMORPGS simply because of the nature that it allows people to connect to each other. Usually MMORPGS are all about grinding skills on your character and then interacting with other people in the same server, whether it be taking on raids, or doing certain events. For social media, there are some similarities in that you can “grind” your online profile or persona, whether it be through likes, or followers, or comments. As such you can also use this “power” in order to influence others, so in a sense these seemingly meaningless statistics do have some real life value.
7. IDENTITY: MMORPGs are unique in the sense that it allows you to connect with other people similarly to that in real life. You can do whatever you want to do(that the game allows), and whenever you want to. Like real life, you can’t do EVERYTHING, you have options, and in a MMORPG, these options are just more unrealistic.
